The Dog Ate My Homework

The mathematician Paul
Erdős had an
Erdős number of
0. Anyone who has
written a paper with Erdős
has an Erdős number of 1.
Anyone who writes a paper
with someone having an
Erdős number of 1
has an Erdős number of 2.
And so on.

In his biography
My Brain Is Open,
Bruce Schechter
writes about Erdős numbers and the insights
Jerry
Grossman's Erdős
Number Project
gives into the sociology of
mathematical collaboration.
When Erdős started publishing,
very few maths papers had
more than one author: in 1940,
90% of papers were one-author
efforts; in 2000,
fewer than half were.
Discussing this growth in collaboration
and the publish-or-perish mentality,
Schechter presents the following
verse written by Erdős:

A theorem a day
Means promotion and pay!
A theorem a year
And you're out on your ear!

That's how research is now; but things used
to be different. Here's an
anecdote I found in
The Gatekeeper,
the autobiography of
literary critic and English don
Terry Eagleton:

I heard later of an antique Cambridge don who
worked in a small department which had just
acquired a new, zealous head who insisted that his
colleagues produce some tangible
evidence of research. In the Cambridge
of those days, this would no doubt have
been as stunning a demand as requiring the
dons to have sexual intercourse in public
with sheep. Publication was in general regarded
as a mildly vulgar, publicity-seeking
affair, as opposed to more enduring
achievements like providing some robust
chairmanship of the college wine
committee. The new head of department,
fed up of having to chivvy his laggard
colleagues, eventually set them a
deadline for producing their research,
and as the hour of reckoning drew
nearer, the ancient don grew more and
more visibly agitated. Finally, at ten
minutes to midnight on the deadline day,
the window of his house in a leafy
Cambridge suburb was heard to open,
and his quavering voice rang out
across the street: 'Stop thief!
He's got my research!'